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Three nightmares and two scenes from life

 

 

1.  Theater of cruelty

 

 

High in the lifeguard chair the director grows precariously tall,

shouting through his megaphone—

 

it’s you. We’re playing Hamlet in an Olympic swimming pool

without an audience.

 

Mattresses float, roped together in the foreground

(someone pretends to sleep)

 

an alarm clock hammers into bells; the narrator springs forward

like a sprung trap—it’s me,

 

on one of the mattress rafts, ready to set the scene

for tragedy, my parts

 

in this one even rhyme (someone floating face-down

in the background)

 

and you above us resetting the clock over and over

because you can.

 

 

 

 

2.  That one summer

 

 

we stayed up late talking stars, you and me

and the astronomer

 

those nights you slept in the living room

She was young

 

everything impressed her equally

(especially you)

 

she didn’t know that you were laughing at her

Midwestern ideas

 

My room was inside your room so you said

isn’t it time

 

for you to go to bed?  I thought past time

put some music on and

 

couldn’t tell if the walls of my room

were shrinking

 

towards me or filling with water or filling

with dirt

 

 

 

 

3.  The typewriter

 

 

After sex (terrible even in dreams) I went looking for your typewriter

in the closet

 

which was long like the old cloakrooms in elementary school

30 hooks lined up

 

at reach-for level on the wall and kids lined up (either alphabetically or

according to height)

 

to be counted before lunch. When my mother went to college

freshmen girls still lined up

 

naked and posed for posture-checking photographs during orientation

like Tereza’s nightmare.

 

Your dorm room was an open field (with a mattress on the floor somewhere)

and in the closet

 

there weren’t so many hooks but there were boxes to look inside of

and two typewriters.

 

Half naked, stooped over, searching, I found the broken

one first, had to find

 

the good one before you got out of the shower. I said you smell good. 

You caught me—balanced

 

something heavy on my back. I turned, it fell and you were yelling

how could you be so stupid

 

to think I wanted you and other words, too,

but everything was these words.

 

 

 

 

4.  Hotel

 

 

We had to share our room with thirty other women

you’d been sleeping with

 

not a room, really, but a kind of suite crammed full

with rundown furniture

 

The women wandering half-dressed between the beds

and rooms were difficult

 

to count and their faces could change like television channels

change constantly

 

filling the room with a strange unsteady glow and laughter, too

hidden in every corner

 

 

 

 

5.  The joke

 

 

At least once you came to me at night

in the body

 

of someone I loved more recently

or not yet,

 

but I wasn’t fooled, wasn’t surprised.

Your changes

 

don’t surprise me. In your room

you nailed up

 

one blank white mask that shook

its head no

 

when the fan was on.




Elizabeth Gross

levelheaded: Three nightmares and two scenes from life

 

By opening with the recollection of a nightmare in which the narrator sets “the scene / for tragedy,” Elizabeth Gross’s poem itself is steered toward an unhappy ending. The first section offers vivid details of a bizarre production of “Hamlet in an Olympic swimming pool / without an audience.” Most noteworthy, however, is the relationship revealed between the speaker and “you”—a person who holds special power, the ability to reset “the clock over and over” in a physical setting where humans don’t exactly seem to thrive, clinging to rafts in water with “someone floating face-down / in the background.”

 

Check out the shift in verb tense in section two. Time dictated by someone else, we are transported from the present into a recollection of the past. This shift doesn’t seem random, especially given Gross’s decision to italicize “past time” at the end of a line. Again, this relationship between the speaker and “you” seems especially significant in the context of a physical place—“My room was inside your room.” The imbalance of power between the poem’s “I” and its “you” is further demonstrated as the speaker recalls that she “couldn’t tell if the walls of my room / were shrinking // towards me or filling with water or filling / with dirt.”

 

The world seems to be closing in on the speaker. In section three, though she recalls that “Your dorm room was an open field,” she was physically confined to the elementary school-esque closet therein. The discomforting memory of her mother and other female college students posing nude for “posture-checking photographs during orientation” is echoed in the humility experienced by the speaker who was stupid enough to think herself desired.

 

It’s difficult to distinguish which of these scenes are nightmares, and which are drawn from real life. This seems to be at least part of the point here—to convey that, for the speaker of this poem, life can be nightmarish, and dreams can be life-like. The woman who is confined and inadequate in some settings finds herself in a “kind of suite crammed full / with rundown furniture” together with “you” and “thirty other women / you’d been sleeping with” in another.

 

By the poem’s end, in the context of her relationship with “you,” the narrator interprets any brush with love as little more than pretense. The “you” who once had directorial control is reduced to simply acting. Yet, like a ghost, like a heart-wrenching tragedy, through his final act, this actor and the mask he hangs exhibit a haunting power to deny, and a haunting power to move.

 

 

– The Editors